Selected Publications

Publication Description

This dissertation examines the recent influx of Pentecostal-charismatic churches into the Northern Region of Ghana, a rural, underdeveloped area whose predominantly Muslim population has increasingly become the target of evangelistic efforts undertaken by Christians from the south. Although a number of scholars have considered the Pentecostal revival as it has materialized within the urban environs of Africa’s metropolitan centers, few have documented the repercussions of Pentecostalism’s confrontation with Islam, and fewer still have followed the churches into their sites of evangelization and conversion. My work fills this gap by charting the social and political, ethical and existential forms that are being engendered and foreclosed as Pentecostal believers encounter those pathologized “others” who epitomize the obverse image of their vision of a miracle-filled existence. Tacking continuously between the most intimate of desires, anxieties, and aspirations and the most public of denunciations, representations, and events, I show how a two-hundred-plus-year history – stretching from the pre-colonial era to the current War on Terror – of figuring Muslim northerners as variously fearsome, pitiable, and of questionable humanity has today been taken over by an impassioned charismatic campaign to reclaim the impoverished hinterland. In the end, my study illuminates the dramatic role of this brand of Christianity in the constitution of a life, a future, a world – a world to which the allegedly unsaved inhabitants of northern Ghana, like so many across the continent today, are being beckoned with startling effect.